Fees and Marketplace Applications

Marketplace fees let you (marketplace developers, e-commerce providers, and shopping cart integrators) earn a commission from each transaction between buyers and sellers. If you are familiar with the Marketplace Use Case, you know that marketplace applications that pay you a commission on the transaction require two separate calls to the Pay API: one to make the purchase transaction, and then another to pay the commission. In Amazon FPS terminology, the call to make the purchase transaction between the buyer and the seller is the master transaction. The call to pay the commission is the marketplace fee transaction. Amazon Flexible Payments Service simplifies master and marketplace fee transactions in the web services API and makes it easy for you to introduce the fees in the Co-Branded UI pipeline.

Tip

If you are interested in adding marketplace fees to your application quickly, the Amazon Simple Pay Marketing Tools generate copy and paste HTML that can be used in an application. You use the Amazon Simple Pay Marketplace widget to add Amazon Payments functionality to a marketplace site and take a cut of each transaction. Using the Marketplace widget, shopping cart integrators can add a Amazon Simple Pay button to their web sites or marketplace developers can generate copy and paste HTML for Accept Marketplace Fee buttons as well as Amazon Simple Pay buttons. For additional information, go to the Amazon Simple Pay Implementation Guide.

Why should you take advantage of marketplace fees? Marketplace Fees are flexible and can be a fixed amount of each transaction, a variable amount such as a percentage of the transaction amount, or a combination of the two. You choose how the fees are structured for your application. In addition, there are other benefits of Marketplace Fees:

You can realize these benefits without complicating the purchase process with tracking identifiers or sharing access keys. The approach is simple and you can read the following paragraphs to get started using marketplace fees in your application.

The first step is to include the fee structure in the registration process for your site. The Co-Branded UI pipeline for recipient tokens supports Marketplace Fees through maxFixedFee and maxVariableFee parameters that you pass to the pipeline. The parameters represent the maximum fixed or variable fee charged to the seller for the transaction. The maximum fixed fee and maximum variable fee are presented in the UI during the registration process and the seller must click Confirm to accept these values as marketplace fees. If no other fee parameter is specified during a Pay or Reserve call, the maximum fee becomes the default fee for the transaction. For more information, see Acquiring Recipient Tokens and Recipient Token Installation Pipeline

The second step is to use the marketplace fee parameters in a transaction. The commission the seller pays is determined by the default parameters established in the Co-Branded UI pipeline, or by the parameters MarketplaceFixedFee or MarketplaceVariableFee you pass in a call to the Pay or Reserve actions. When you call one of these actions, Amazon FPS validates your parameters with the values specified in the CBUI pipeline. If you do not supply values for MarketplaceFixedFee or MarketplaceVariableFee, then the maxFixedFee and maxVariableFee values become the default values for the transaction. You can also supply MarketplaceFixedFee or MarketplaceVariableFee parameters that are less than the maxFixedFee and maxVariableFee values. For example, if you decide to offer a discount to sellers, you can specify a lower fee rate using the parameters you pass to the Pay action. When you do this, Amazon FPS uses the MarketplaceFixedFee or MarketplaceVariableFee parameters instead of the default values.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service supports actions in the web services API that enable the master and marketplace fee transactions to occur within a single API call. Once the call is made to Amazon FPS, the master transaction is processed using the payment instructions supplied in the caller, seller, and buyer tokens. When the master transaction completes, Amazon FPS handles the marketplace fee transaction and uses Account Balance Transfer (ABT) to transfer the fees from the seller's Amazon Payments account to your account. Again, there are no Amazon Payments fees incurred on the marketplace fee transaction. For more information, see Pay or Reserve.

	Important
	Amazon FPS verifies that the seller agreed to the terms stated during registration, including the maximum fixed and variable fee amounts.

By default, the marketplace fee transaction paid by the seller is not refunded when a refund is requested from a merchant. However, as the marketplace developer or shopping cart integrator, you have the option to participate and refund the fee to the merchant if you choose to do so. In order to refund the marketplace fee, you must call Refund with the optional MarketplaceRefundPolicy parameter, along with one other parameter that identifies the transaction. For more information, see Refund.

For more details, see Pay, Reserve, Settle, or Refund in the Amazon Flexible Payments Service Developer Guide.